Wednesday, November 07, 2012

A Shipboard Dinner, 1907.

For the remainder of the
week, I would like you to go cruising with me. I thought we would travel
vicariously during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century.

Our first voyage is aboard
the Cunard ship R.M.S ‘Carmania.’ It is one hundred and five years ago to the
day. We are on the last day or so of a trip from New York to Liverpool. We sit
down to a reassuringly plain English dinner.

Cunard Line

R.M.S ‘Carmania’, Thursday, November 7, 1907.

MENU

Consomme Brunoise

Cod Fish, Oyster Sauce

Curried Veal and Rice

Roast Turkey, Sauce Espagnole

Ox Tongue, Spinach

Roast Leg of Mutton, Onion Sauce

-

Boiled Rice

Dressed Cabbage
Boiled Potatoes

-

Semolina Pudding

Plum TartOrange
Jelly

Fancy Pastry

-

Ice Cream Dessert

CheeseCrackersCoffee

It is interesting that the
old usage of the word ‘dessert’ persists on this menu. Today we would view the
puddings and pastries as the dessert, but once upon a time the word referred to
a final course of nuts, dried fruit and other sweetmeats. Before they were the ‘dessert’
these little treats were the ‘banquetting stuff’ – and the ‘banquet’ was the
final course of a meal.

Milk puddings have a
special place in the English psyche. The English have never grown out of their
love of nursery puddings – or at least, they had still not grown out of it well
into the twenty-first century.

Semolina
Pudding.

Take
from one quart of milk enough to mix with one ounce of arrow-root, boil the
remainder, and pour on the arrow-root, sprinkle and stir in three ounces of
semolina, three tea-spoonfuls of sugar, one table-spoonful of orange-flower
water; let this be cold, and then add two eggs well beaten and stirred in; butter
the dish, and put a small piece on the top. Bake it one hour in a moderate
oven.

The Practical
Cook, English and Foreign, by J. Bregion and A. Miller (1845)

3 comments:

April Bullock
said...

Bregion and Miller is a wonderful cookbook, such an interesting combination of quintessentially English and "foreign" foods (including a ham with a good flavor but an unfortunate shape).Thank you for the cruise!

Hi Doug. At a dinner on land, they would have been served, most likely, in an informal buffet style: platters piled elegantly high with fruit, and beautiful dishes of nuts and sweetmeats, and thin biscuits. Guests would help themselves. I think on board ship, there would have been something similar, perhaps smaller fruit platters for each table.